But, they’re few and far between… and the ones that exist are just in the early stages of development.

It’s not just about what “hooks” you have in your plugin. That is important (it NEEDS to be there)… but it’s also about:

What kind of delivery system do you have in place to deliver apps developed on your platform?

What kind of support do you offer developers?

Have you created a marketplace for developers to sell apps in an integrated way?

Do you have the back-end infrastructure in place to support all of this and make it easy for customers to use?

Who would you rather be? Apple selling millions of its platform largely due to its apps… earning a piece of the pie for every app sold on its platform or the app-maker earning solely based on what you yourself can develop?

Even more… and this is so absolutely critical to get… in a community like WordPress’ where many plugin authors are in direct competition with one another, do you think you can continue to stay viable when your competitors are thinking like Apple and you’re still thinking like Doodle Jump?

Not a “there’s always room for everybody” situation… but a you’re in direct competition with someone acting like Apple… building platforms with a full-blown marketplaces behind them… aimed squarely at running you out of business?

Who do you think wins?

What We Should Be Doing

For context, here’s my mindset…

I think of WordPress as a Content Management Platform. WishList Member is a WordPress plugin, but I see it as a Content Monetization Platform.

It sits on top of WordPress and exposes content monetization services to WordPress itself and to the apps developed on top of it.

All of this will become critical with what comes next. What comes next is what makes a plugin a platform whether you like it or not. What comes next is what makes it almost impossible for a competitor to beat you.

What comes next is what premium WordPress plugins 5-10 years from now will HAVE to be in order to even compete… let alone win.